Earthshock Part One

The one where an old enemy makes a surprise return...

The year is 2526, but some things don't change. They still have quarries in the 26th century, and this is where we find Lieutenant Scott and his band of refreshingly mixed-sex troopers as they investigate a case of missing palaeontologists (and geologists). A band of ologists searching for fossils in a newly discovered cave system were attacked, and presumably killed, with just one - Professor Kyle - escaping to tell the tale. Scott remains suspicious.

There's almost five minutes spent with these guest characters, and it's directed with urgency and pace by Peter Grimwade, one of Doctor Who's best in years. It's particularly pleasing to see so many female actors in the military roles, including Suzi Arden's Snyder, Anne Clements' Baines, and Scott's deputy, Ann Holloway's Sergeant Mitchell. This is the 26th century after all, and it's great to see some forward-thinking and equality in the casting (in fact, eight of this story's 18 credited actors are female, which is pretty marvellous).

While the troopers chat up top, two dark and mysterious figures scuttle about down in the caves below. They're fleetingly seen in silhouette and shadow, but you can just make out that they are svelte, faceless beings in black body stockings (body stockings were a bit of a thing in the Davison era; see also Time-Flight and The Five Doctors). On the face of it, they're not all that scary, but when joined by Malcolm Clarke's rumbling, queasy underscore, there's a definite feeling of menace about them.

Not only has Grimwade cast well, and Clarke scored effectively, but Bernard Lloyd-Jones has come up with some very convincing underground cave sets, convincingly lit by Fred Wright, so when we see Scott and his troops yomping through the caverns, their helmet lights picked out in the gloom, it puts me in mind of James Cameron's work in Aliens (which of course, is four years in Earthshock's future). So as well as all this kudos, we have to applaud costume designer Dinah Collin too. It's a tour de force!

Meanwhile, aboard the good ship TARDIS, the Doctor is having his ear bent by a sulky Adric, but to be honest, this has been a long time coming. Watching Seasons 18 and 19 through in order, in quicker succession than they were broadcast, has shown me what a raw deal poor Adric gets, especially since the Doctor's regeneration. Adric was there first, before Tegan, before Nyssa, and long before cricket. Adric was the Fourth Doctor's faithful young ward, but the TARDIS is now a very different environment, a much less nurturing place to live.

Adric's feeling left out, teased by the others, perhaps even bullied. He's with the Doctor to see the universe, but also to learn (remember the Fourth Doctor's broken promise to show him Gallifrey?). However, since the girls came on the scene, the focus has been on trying to get Tegan back home, and Adric feels less and less time has been spent by the Doctor on his development. This accentuates the point that Adric sees the Doctor - whichever version - as his mentor, a teacher as well as a guardian. The boy needs a father figure, but this hasn't really panned out the way he thought. So he wants to go home, to Terradon in E-Space, and this does not a happy Doctor make.

Some people criticise early 1980s Who for the soapy TARDIS scenes, but this is a natural character progression deserving of attention. It should always have ended up here, with Adric giving up on the Doctor and wanting to go home (that's two of the TARDIS crew wanting to leave now!). The Doctor reacts angrily, insisting there is no way to plot a course through a random CVE to E-Space, and Peter Davison goes full-throttle Hartnell. It's great how Davison can make his Doctor seem so crotchety and ill-tempered despite his youthful appearance. It would be easy to see the Fifth Doctor's moodiness as immaturity, because of his outward appearance, but Davison plays it just right, so that his boyishness doesn't obscure the character. There's a world-weariness, a splash of eccentricity, about his portrayal that makes us see him as the older man that he is, rather than the younger man that he looks.

There's an awful lot of continuity thrown into these TARDIS scenes though, from the keepsakes from past adventures in Adric's room (The Visitation, Kinda, Black Orchid) to mentions of CVEs, E-Space, Terradon, Logopolis and Romana. This is very rewarding for fans, and long-term viewers, but not so great for the millions casually dipping in and out of Doctor Who every week. Doctor Who of the 1980s was being made for fans, and the playback generation.

The TARDIS materialises in a cave system on Earth in 2526 (oh-oh!) so that the Doctor can have a walk outside (underground?) and get away from Adric's petulance. Tegan and Nyssa work to soothe the Doctor and Adric's tempers, leaving the boy to drum up some calculations to prove the TARDIS can return to Terradon, and joining the Doctor outside for a history lesson about the dinosaurs. It all feels very Hartnell-esque, with the Doctor teaching Tegan and Nyssa all about the giant lizards and how they were wiped out "almost overnight". And despite her almost total ignorance about the history of Earth, Nyssa still manages to patronise Tegan by telling her she's forgetting about displacement. Oh, of course, silly Tegan!

Elsewhere, Scott's troops are getting wiped out one by one. First, injured Baines and her comrade disappear, and then Snyder, who went to look for them, vanishes from Walters' scanner screen. It's a clever idea of Grimwade's to have the deaths represented by lights going out on a screen, rather than showing their violent demises. It seems much more powerful that way. We see characters killed in Doctor Who all the time, but to see them extinguished via electronic signals flashing on a screen is much colder, and affecting, building the mystery and tension as we "see" people dying, but not how or why.

By the way, Walters says there is an ectopic signal on the scanner (ie, the Doctor), claiming it means who or whatever it is has two hearts, but that's not strictly true. Ectopic simply means the presence of tissue, cells etc in an abnormal or unexpected position, not necessarily a second heart. Maybe the Doctor has a very jumbled anatomy? Perhaps his liver is in his leg...?

All this death is pretty gritty for Doctor Who, and quite relentless. In particular, the death of Snyder is gruesomely visceral, as the camera pans slowly across a puddle of fizzing, suppurating, liquidised human remains. We glimpse Snyder's boneless, fleshless hand still holding the communicator, and then her name badge festering among the residue of goo and gore (we later see a trooper stand in the mushy viscera). This is Doctor Who at 7.10pm on a Monday night, but scenes like this could be straight out of a late night video nasty. It's wonderful, but also too strong for younger viewers in my opinion. It's not scary or frightening, just gratuitously disgusting. If I were a parent in 1982 and saw my six-year-old watching that, I wouldn't feel confident leaving them in front of Doctor Who any more. With this one scene, the family show for children of all ages has crossed a line into a more graphic, less guarded adult form of science-fiction gaining ground on the cinema screens of the time (Alien, Scanners etc).

The two story strands converge beautifully when the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa wander into the mining site and Lieutenant Scott's trap. Scott is uncompromisingly rough with this most vulnerable of Doctors, throwing him about and grabbing him by the lapels. Tensions rise even more when the affable Fifth Doctor meets someone who has no time for niceties and prefers to use might over conversation (see also: Stotz in The Caves of Androzani). The situation feels that little bit more dangerous, and when they start to dig out a mysterious hatch in the cave wall, the arrival of the silent shadows erupts into carnage.

The Doctor identifies them as androids, and their explosive hand weapons prove devastating. With one aim, a trooper is reduced to a pile of steaming clothes, all trace of flesh and bone liquefied. The troopers' laser beams are far, far less convincing, looking like elongated toot sweets from Lord Scrumptious's candy factory in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Maybe the lasers looked good at the time, maybe they didn't, but they're not helped by looking so deliciously pink among the gloom of the caverns. Sorry, Dave Chapman, but your video effects just don't work.

What does work is the cliffhanger! The viewer sees the scene from the point of view of an android, a scarlet perspective which focuses in on the Doctor's face. Malcolm Clarke's score strikes a clanging chime as Grimwade cuts to a wide shot of three Cybermen watching the same image. CYBERMEN! And then he cuts to a medium close-up of the Cyberleader: "Destroy them! Destroy them at once!"

It's a doozy. Nobody in 1982 was expecting the Cybermen, who'd not had their own story since 1975's hit-and-miss Revenge of the Cybermen. Before Earthshock, the Cybermen had only had one story in 15 years, but now they were back, looking mightier and more impressive than ever. It's one of Doctor Who's greatest surprises, a reveal that's held back to the last possible, but most powerful, moment. Well done to that production team in 1982, because it remains just as fresh, exhilarating and exciting all these decades later. Luckily, viewers didn't have to wait a whole week to see the story continue, just 24 hours...

First broadcast: March 8th, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: That cliffhanger. What else?
The Bad: As well done as it is, that misjudged shot of gooey Snyder is too strong for family viewing.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Earthshock is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Earthshock-Peter-Davison/dp/B00009PBTQ